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BPL server response time is crap


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Viewing 12 posts - 26 through 37 (of 37 total)
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  • #1937321
    Bob Gross
    BPL Member

    @b-g-2-2

    Locale: Silicon Valley

    "First of all, I am NOT defending any poor service. No way."

    Roger, if it were network congestion leading to the InfoGears node, then the InfoGears index page itself would show that congestion. But it doesn't. It is responding normally. That suggests that the BPL server there may be overtaxed. So, somebody needs to spend some money to upgrade something. Of course, the long term solution may not involve InfoGears itself. When I see errors all over the InfoGears site, that suggests that it may be overtaxed, itself.

    Tick Tock.

    –B.G.–

    #1938176
     
    BPL Member

    @rememberthelorax

    I respect you and all that Roger, you know that, but this issue has got nothing at all to do with anything other then the server that BPL is being served from has reached its limit of load balancing. Obviously we out here have no idea if BPL is being hosted on a dedicated server or a co-hosted server or a virtual server or whatever. But in the end, its reached its limits.

    I have faced this issue dozens of times over the years with my own websites. At some point the concurrent connections to get to be too much and you start having longer query times, and bottlenecks lead to more bottlenecks. You can pay a developer a whole lot of money to try to optimize the code. You can spend even less money and get a newer server and resolve the problems without touching the code. Obviously both is the idea solution.
    A dedicated *managed* server these days is under three hundred bucks a month. (managed server being one where a companies deals with keeping the server updated and so forth).

    Middle of this year I had to upgrade servers running my largest blog service provider website. It was facing the same exact issues that BPL is now suffering – and BPL is suffering it very hard… try opening up a half dozen or dozen tabs all loading BPL pages and see just how bad the load balancing on the server is suffering right now.

    What kind of caching is taking place?

    What kind of IO usage is there on the server?

    What kind of long queries are there?

    What are your max connections set at?

    There are folks out here that really do know how to help you guys solve these issues, with experience with facing and resolving these issues. It would be stupid of BPL to not take advantage of these resources and resolve the problems that plague all of us that use this website.

    #1938215
    Nick Gatel
    BPL Member

    @ngatel

    Locale: Southern California

    I know nothing about servers, caches (other than water), I/O, etc.

    I do know that I just did an eBay search that returned 2.5 million results in about 1/2 the time it took to get this thread to open up.

    Now, to me, that would indicate that something is broken on BPL.

    Come on guys, feed your squirrels some more peanuts so they can crank up their speed in the cage.

    #1938217
    Nick Gatel
    BPL Member

    @ngatel

    Locale: Southern California

    IT Support

    BPL Server and Support Services

    #1938219
    Bob Gross
    BPL Member

    @b-g-2-2

    Locale: Silicon Valley

    Don't let Roger Caffin see that.

    –B.G.–

    #1938231
    Roger Caffin
    BPL Member

    @rcaffin

    Locale: Wollemi & Kosciusko NPs, Europe

    > A dedicated *managed* server these days is under three hundred bucks a month.
    Indeed. But does BPL have that sort of money available?

    I am sure everything could be solved with LOTs more money. If only.

    Cheers

    #1938240
    Ken Thompson
    BPL Member

    @here

    Locale: Right there

    " But does BPL have that sort of money available?"

    Well if the MLifers were receiving the annual reports we thought we paid for we would know.

    Customers have been complaining about the software, service forever. You guys are wasting your time.

    Piss poor state of affairs.

    #1938397
    Anonymous
    Inactive

    "Indeed. But does BPL have that sort of money available?"

    Check my math, but I calculate that 180 annual membership renewals should cover $3600/year for a dedicated, managed server. There are a lot more renewals than that, if I'm not mistaken. To be perfectly honest, what is more important to a website than a server and bandwidth adequate to handle the activity the website generates? What actually has more priority in the current scheme of things.

    "I am sure everything could be solved with LOTs more money. If only."

    $3600 is chump change these days, and a small percentage of the revenue this website generates. This is a bold statement, one I invite BPL management to disprove.

    #1938399
     
    BPL Member

    @rememberthelorax

    But does BPL have that sort of money available?

    If BPL is not bringing in at least $3600 a year to cover a dedicated server than RJ should just sell the Services to somebody that can properly run this service.

    If the largest backpacking website in the world is not even making that little amount of money – given the activity of this website – then really, he should pass it along to somebody like myself or others here at BPL that have decades of our lives invested into running operations such at this.

    Lets just pad that 3600 up to 5000 to cover other issues, we are only talking about 200 annual members per year to cover the very basic of expenses for day to day operations of this website. Does BPL not have that many annual members? Yes, there are other expenses (moderators??, part time developer ??, domain fees – all of about 8 bucks a year, ssl cert = 30 bucks a year, business license, no idea what this is in montana, a couple hundred bucks a year??) so really, what kind of overhead does this website have that cannot generate 5k a year.

    I run a website that has tens of millions of verified page views a month and has members from almost every nation on the planet, and minus my own time it costs less then 5000 bucks a year to keep it operational. It generates me 10 times that much, and I do so without a single bit of advertisement on the website.

    My point here is that there is just no reason that BPL should not be in a position to be able to keep their hardware and software up to date based on the amount of members that I see here.

    I am by no means intending to be critical of RJ or Rodger or anybody else. It is just that the math does not seem to make any sense – as I have said in the past.

    RJ – if you ever see this and are interested in yapping about how to potentially resolve some of these issues, by all means, lets talk… you have my email address (well, the bpl database does).

    #1938418
    Gary Dunckel
    BPL Member

    @zia-grill-guy

    Locale: Boulder

    It seems to me that we have had a goodly number of new subscribers (M and MLIFE) join in the past few months. I assume this means that BPL is bringing in some money, where it should (could) do just as you say, John.

    #1941399
    John Donewar
    BPL Member

    @newton

    Locale: Southeastern Texas

    Slllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwwed to a crawl early this morning and resulted in dual and triple posts.

    Canceling the post does nothing because the post finally goes through and we have to delete the multiple posts after the fact. :-(

    Seems a little better now.

    Party On,

    Newton

    #1941451
    Ken Thompson
    BPL Member

    @here

    Locale: Right there

    [email protected]

    [email protected]

    Anyone try e mailing Ryan?

    How about we all do it at one time?

    You have 1734 unread messages…

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